Rust Project Management

As the size of a program grows, it becomes increasingly important to use an organizational system to keep the codebase manageable. It’s a good idea to consider code organization carefully, especially for large projects.

Rust has several features designed to help developers work with large or growing codebases. Collectively, this is called the module system, but it includes more than just modules.

Overview of Project Management Features in Rust

Rust contains several important features for managing projects, including modules, crates, packages, and workspaces. This section contains a high-level overview of these project management features:

Module: Modules allow us to partition code within a single crate. Modules allow us to customize the scope and privacy of defined sections of code.

Crate: A crate is similar to libraries or packages in other programming languages. Depending on the project, a crate can produce an executable file or a library. Every crate has a root module, and sub-modules can be created within the root module of each crate to form a hierarchy of modules.

Package: A package is a set of one or more crates that provides a set of specified functionality. Every package must contain at least one crate. One package can contain multiple binary crates but only one library crate.

Workspace: For large projects, a workspace allows for the management of multiple related packages. A workspace can be thought of as a set of packages that share the same output directory and Cargo.lock.

Library vs. Binary: A crate can be produce either a library or a binary. Alibrary is a reusable piece of code that can be linked into other programs, while a binary is a standalone executable that can be run directly.